The Best of Us

five

SEPTEMBER 2014

"GOOD MORNING," HE murmured, a smile catching in his eyes and in the shadow of his lips. His eyes were still flickering over me, his face soft with the idle aftermath of good sleep and his cheek resting against his pillow.

"Morning," I mumbled, my voice raspy. After swiftly pulling my hand away from him, I propped myself up on my lower arms. He didn't say anything, but that quick glint in his eyes was too loud to ignore. I looked away from him, focused my eyes on his lavendered pillow, and shuffled a little, clearing my throat. "Time is it?"

Sunlight was streaming through his blinds and pooling inside of his room, the warmth of it pricking a shiver along my arms and my back and the nape of my neck. Everything in the world existed inside of this room. Everything that was real, anyway. Him and his sunlight and his lavender and his bedsheets and his voice and the smell of his shampoo.

"Only a little past ten," he sighed, turning his head and staring up at the ceiling, his palms flat on his chest. "Heaven and Layla are going out to eat in a couple of hours."

"Yeah?" I asked, daring to glance at him. I had a faint headache, dull and hollow, lazily throbbing and expanding inside of my skull.

"We're invited."

"Hm."

He flattened his cheek against his pillow again and blinked at me. "But we don't have to go."

"No, no," I assured, digging the heels of my palms into my heavy eyes. I always had bags under my eyes, no matter how faint they were. Even when I slept long and hard, they never fully disappeared. "I'll go. I'd rather get it over with, anyway."

"You know, Layla might not have even spoken to Miles yet," he suggested.

I removed my hands from my eyes and glanced at him, half-smiling. The pounding of my head had been eased in my temporary darkness.

"And even if she has spoken to him," he continued, "she might not have forgiven him. Maybe she'll be on your side this time."

When I laughed, he frowned.

"I know you don't listen to her," he muttered, "but you can't always be the bad guy. She has to know that."

"Doesn't matter what she knows," I told him. "I have to be the bad guy or she can't forgive him."

"I don't understand why she's so eager to forgive him anyway," he mumbled.

"Because she would rather be miserable with Miles than risk being miserable alone," I explained. "Why were you always so eager to forgive Willa?"

He said nothing for a minute, merely gazed up at the ceiling. "I thought I loved her," he said finally.

There was a tight twinge in my chest and my heart ached, throbbed the way that my head did, and grew heavy. "But you didn't, did you?" I asked.

"No," he said, almost entirely unmoving. Even his voice, usually silver and clear, was flat and quiet. He paused. "I don't know. Maybe I did."

Bradley had two ex-girlfriends. Brown-eyed, blonde Mia Wells and green-eyed, brunette Willa Cooper. I hadn't liked either of them, but Mia Wells, at least, became more tolerable after they parted. Mostly because she had grown up. Her relationship with Bradley had blossomed in the middle of freshman year and withered by the end. The whole thing was- like my relationship with my own freshman girlfriend, Allison Edgars- completely juvenile.

During their time together, I had not liked Mia and Mia had not liked me and Bradley, as Bradley often did, kept building bridges anyway. Mia and I were always burning them down before he could finish them.